War against the Strogg
The human race was suddenly thrust into a full-scale worldwide war with the Strogg in the mid 21st Century. Though initially they believed that the Strogg intended to strip Earth of its natural resources, humans soon learned that the Strogg are only in search of one thing that their existence required: the human remains of those they kill. It became clear that the Strogg were collecting the humans' own dead and using them to augment their own armies by attaching weapons and machinery welded onto their bodies, and turning them into mindless soldiers slaved to the Strogg's purpose. Initially the Strogg gained the advantage in the war, but the humans were resourceful and used their skills of innovation to learn more about the Strogg and the means to their undoing. Even still the war lasted many years and it was only by sacrificing countless lives and draining the planet's resources that humans were able to drive the Strogg offworld. The experience with the Strogg shook the human race forever and left them mentally scarred, leaving them terrified of a possible renewed invasion by the enemy. The humans knew that the Strogg would not give up their attempt to take Earth so easily, and were convinced that the enemy would be going to make a new attack. As strangely as it sounds, the humans were also determined to smite their revenge against the Strogg for devastating Earth, which to them seemed an adequate reason to storm Stroggos itself. When they had located the Strogg homeworld, the humans' newly constituted Space Marine Corps (SMC), assembled from the toughest of the former GDF (Global Defence Force), attempted to land on Stroggos to smite their vengeance for the Strogg's attack on Earth. They made a monumental miscalculation because the Strogg had a massive defence system known as the "Big Gun" which they used to destroy most of the drop pods on entry. Of the remainder of the drop pods most of the passengers were immediately captured and subject to various grim fates, such as the case of some marines seemingly being crushed into a pool of blood that the Strogg intended to drink. Only one marine survived the initial landing operation and went about the mission on his own. The survivor, in a seemingly doomed preicament alone on Stroggos, led his own one-man insurgency against the Strogg, with his targets being the Big Gun (presumably because this would guarantee relatively safe entry for the continued human invasion) and the Makron, an entity identified as the leader of the Strogg. In a long and daring operation, against all odds, this marine succeeded in his objectives. With the Makron dead and the Big Gun destroyed, the humans had gained a window of opportunity, since the former disorganised the Strogg by leaving their command structure headless and reeling and the latter took away Stroggos' main planetary defence system. The SMC exploited the opportunity by launching a much larger second invasion of Stroggos in the belief it would finish off the Strogg once and for all. However, it was much more complicated than they expected. As usual the Strogg proved to be more resilient than the humans hoped, and they had not only reconstructed their Makron but their military forces were under a much more advanced system of tactical co-ordination than the humans, known as the Strogg Communication Network. The most elite handful of the SMC, led mainly by the toughest of the toughest, "Rhino Squad", was entrusted with a mission that the humans' commanders believed would neutralise the Strogg Communication Network thereby cutting off the Strogg soldiers from their commanders. It involved bringing down a form of technology known as the Nexus, which the humans so far had little information on but knew it was vital. Rhino Squad's target was one of the Strogg's central communication hubs called the Tetranode, which they believed an EMP bomb could neutralise and that this action would effectively bring down the Nexus and, by extension, the Strogg Communication Network. During the briefing the Nexus was described as the Strogg's "strength, but also their Achilles Heel". Though Rhino Squad succeeded in reaching the Tetranode their luck ran out once they were inside the main structure. The EMP bomb was destroyed by the sudden appearance of a travelling harvester. Then Matthew Kane, Rhino Squad's stealthy scout, the only squadmember who was uninjured in the incident, was given the responsibility of destroying the Tetranode itself with the assistance of Johan Strauss, a brilliant engineer with great knowledge about Strogg technology. By deactivating the cooling systems Kane succeeded in overheating the Tetranode and it destroyed itself. He then disappeared just as the Makron appeared and was later discovered stroggified in a Strogg medical facility. Since the neurocyte in his head had not been activated, because his his own squad arrived in time to save him, he was able to remain under human control despite having the increased co-ordination and physical abilities that Strogg tactical units possess. He offered a new opportunity to the humans. They used him to breach Strogg barriers and use teleporters and ultimately penetrate past the Strogg security into the central Nexus Core tower. There he assassinated the second Makron in an eerie repetition of the events that ended the previous human onslaught against the Strogg, and then destroyed the Nexus itself, revealed to be a massive brain-like structure the Strogg had been using all along to brilliantly co-ordinate their military forces via the Strogg Communication Network. The end result is that the Strogg are now fighting on equal footing as the humans, since the latter did not have such a monumental control system as the Nexus to manage all of their strategies, and while the Strogg did the humans were being constantly outmanoueuvred in terms of battle moves.